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There isn’t a much higher compliment you can pay a new work than wanting to hear it again the moment it has finished. George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, which received its world premiere last summer in Aix-en-Provence, now arrives at the Royal Opera House, which co-commissioned it. Predicting the future is a tricky business — we critics mark well that La traviata and Madama Butterfly were deemed failures on their first nights — but this music drama is surely here to stay.

This is almost as much because of Martin Crimp’s salty libretto as it is Benjamin’s ingenious score, which the composer